The Infinity of the Human Mind
One of the original practitioners of psychology, Carl Jung, had a theory about humanity. The idea was that we, as humans, are eternally evolving as a species. The average human being has 44 autosomes and two sex chromosomes; his idea was that as a species we would evolve at some point to have 46 autosomes along with the two sex chromosomes. Those two autosomes may not sound like all that much, but they would change everything. From how our minds operate, to how our memories are stored, to how our bodily organs function, and even to how our immune system operates. It will be the absolute biggest change in human history. Scientists who believe in this "Forty-Six and Two" theory say that it will take hundreds of thousands of years for these changes to happen. But I know better than that... I have seen the future of our civilization... The future of humanity. It is bleak and grim--and there is no way to stop it. Let me introduce myself to you. I will not tell you my real name for fear of prosecution for what I have done, but you can call me Bill for all intents and purposes. I am a scientist whose interest had once been in the study of the evolution of the human mind and its consciousness. If anybody on this earth knows about the human mind, it is me. It once gripped me with fascination: the last frontier of medical science (that of the human mind and its infinite complexity). The story begins in the year 1995. I was young and had graduated medical school only three years prior. I was called up by the company I was working for at the time, which was a government-subsidized firm. I mostly performed experiments with albino rats that involved tests about self-actualization and intelligence with these rats and had made some breakthrough progress involving psychoactive substances such as psilocybin mushrooms, dimethyltryptamine, and lysergic acid diethylamide to test the potential effects on consciousness expansion. After dosing rats day after day, they had seemed to developed communication to each other through some primitive form of Morse code. Very little could be discerned from these creatures, though they seemed to only be able to form simple words to express hunger, thirst, and procreation. I was fascinated by how a simple substance could expand the mind, and how we could apply this to humans. I published these findings in a science newsletter and about a week later got a response from a man. His name was Desmond, a leader of a team of scientists who conducted their research 60 miles south of where we were based. The letter read as follows: "Dear Bill, We have read your findings, and have been working on a similar subject, though we wish to focus our experiments on human subjects. We concern ourselves with the evolution of human beings and are attempting to explore the mind and consciousness at an angle we have never seen before except for ancient tribes, deep and isolated in the remote jungles. We believe that you could be a valuable asset for our team. Worry not about finances, as the venture will also prove to be lucrative. We will also provide housing to you on 'The Farm', along with all the other members of the team. The experiments we are performing is a trade secret, and we cannot disclose any further details until we meet in person. Reply to this letter, and rent a room at the Lamplight Motel on the outskirts of Dalton. Sincerely, Desmond Charleston" I looked down at the letter and thought about the proposal. What I would leave behind... What I had to gain, what I had to lose... In the end, I wrote him back and accepted his offer. The next week I quit my job at the company I had been working for, packed my belongings into my vehicle, and drove a long stretch of highway into the city of Dalton. I went to the motel on the outskirts of town he had told me to rent a room at, and I settled in for the night. At three o'clock in the morning, I received a call from the front desk. I picked up the phone and groggily said, "Hello?" "Hello, sir. There is someone here to see you,” the receptionist said in a cheerful manner. "A mister... Desmond." My eyes shot open, and I said, "I will be down just momentarily." Getting dressed, I hung up the phone and then went out the door and down to the lobby where I was met by a tall man with slicked back hair, a large nose, and over-sized rectangular spectacles. "How do you do, Bill?" he said with a smile on his face. "I'm doing... good," I mumbled out, still a bit groggy. We had a brief chat in the front lobby, then I went with him out the door and into the near desolate parking lot. We had a long and arduous journey to what they called "The Farm." The Farm was a research facility over two hours from the city of Dalton. It was on a green meadow, far removed from any area of civilization. The building was a five-story high monolith and had a terrifying facade to it. It was built in the style of 60's brutalist architecture. A dark concrete was used for the walls of the structure with a top that jutted out. The windows were large and equally spaced out with four on each story. The twilight hour gave the building a strange glow, and the colors of the sky contrasted with the dark and brooding nature of the building. We approached the building and continued inside, walking past small rooms with various amenities, i.e. showers, beds, a refrigerator, a stove, a table, etc. Finally, we reached the end of the hallway and arrived at an office. We both took a seat and he began to look over some paperwork. "So..." he said in a calm demeanor. "You are probably wondering what your duties here will be." "Yes," I rebutted. "Well, your job will be simple. All you do is collect observations from the test subjects, and once a day you will perform a simple evaluation of them, testing their emotional, physical, and mental state." "And what of this trade secret?" I questioned. "Ah, yes. This would be of high interest to you." He pulled out a small vial with tinfoil wrapped around it. "We have been synthesizing this for over ten years. We call it Darwin's Serum. We synthesized it using LSD-25 as a precursor, thus why we need to keep it in a container free from light exposure. It seems to increase self-awareness and intellectual capabilities in mammals." "And how do you know this?" I asked him. He got up and motioned with his head for me to follow him. We went into a small room with a medium sized tank, filled with white albino rats. Many noises were heard from within the tank... Thumping, and chewing, and tapping... They were communicating. Not only were they communicating, but they were communicating on a higher level with each other. They seemed to be holding conversations. "Oh my God!" I exclaimed, in awe at the sight. "Yes..." he said. "The implications of this experiment span far and wide. This knowledge could be the ultimate tool for the anthropologist. We could find out how cultures develop on a large scale, but within a small-scale experiment. These rats are 5th generation and seem to be showing signs of self-awareness and intelligence. Our first human experiments will be arriving in a few days." I didn't even object to the questionable safety of this experiment. The gains, well... at the time, at least, seemed to outweigh any potential danger that the subjects may suffer. Oh, what a fool I was... The next few days I spent reading the notes the team had written about the rats. This particular version of Darwin's Serum had only been used on this (single) colony. The first generation of the colony consisted of normal, fully grown white albino rats who had been inspected and were in peak health and physical condition. It included five males and five females; all were injected with the Darwin's Serum. They showed no signs of any hallucinogenic effects from the serum immediately afterwards, and one week later, all the rats were pregnant. When the offspring of the rats were born, they looked normal, maybe even a bit longer. The previous generation was sorted into separate tanks by sex so as to halt procreation after the rats had matured into full adult offspring. This practice continued generation after generation. The second generation seemed to show signs of mild intelligence forming. For example, they would occasionally show signs of higher communication to one another. When the third generation came, they demonstrated increasing signs of intelligence, such as being able to communicate with each other through tapping on the glass of the cage. The fourth generation seemed to be developing a hierarchical society, complete with a king rat who was the strongest of his kind. The rats would bring their king food, water, and mates. When the fifth generation came, the rat king was displaced into a new cage, leaving a new king to emerge from the 5th generation. By this point, it seemed as though these rats were holding entire conversations with each other through their developing primitive noises. I was fascinated by these discoveries, to say the least, and I couldn't wait to begin on my subjects. Five men and five women later arrived, each who had volunteered for the project (most of whom had no connections to any friends or family, as they were not permitted to leave the Farm). All five men and women were injected with a high dose of the serum. Mild nausea and some cases of vomiting happened in the days following, but it cleared up within the next few days. A year later, the children of these subjects were born. They were larger than most human babies, their faces were slightly elongated and their eyes were larger than the average human child. The ears were slightly curved outwardly at the tip, and the mouth was unusually small. The mothers bonded with their children, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary until six months into the experiment--the children seemed to be growing at an alarming rate. All of the subjects had grown both mentally, and physically, and the infants were equal to that of two-year-olds. They could walk, talk, and were even playing games with their kin. This seemed to be an oversight from the previous experiment. We had ceased the experiments on the rats, but I asked Desmond if I could revive the experiment, to which he said yes. I had set up two colonies of rats, one that I would inject the serum into, and one that I wouldn't. To little surprise, the offspring of the ones that had been injected had grown at twice the rate as the other ones. I took this information to Desmond, and things began to really turn sour. I came to him with the concern about the lifespan of the human children, with them growing at such a rate--but he brushed it off and said that it was just an experiment, to not worry about it, and that I was getting too emotionally invested in the children. He was a goddamn madman. By the age of two, all of the children had grown to about the age of five, but they were not normal five-year-olds. Most of them could read at least at a high school level and could comprehend most of the subjects that a high-schooler would face. Subjects like Algebra, World History, Chemistry, and Biology. It was also at this time that they developed these... abilities. I would hear them so clearly; the sounds would come in my head. They were developing telekinesis. I was astonished by this. We had finally discovered a psychic link between humans that had been hiding through some sort of regressive gene. Not only could they communicate telepathically, but they could also perform certain psycho-kinetic feats. Nothing too big, but they could do things like lift forks, spoons, paper--all very small objects. As the years went on, the powers they had grew stronger than ever before. By the age of seven, all of the children had developed and matured to the age of a 20-year-old. At this point, Desmond wished to go on with the experiment, a leap he said would be the completion of the next genetic evolution, and that we would finally see the "Forty-Six and Two" evolution that we had been seeking. I don't know what the hell Desmond was even thinking. I tried to warn him... to tell him that we weren't even sure of how the next generation of children would turn out. I even threatened to quit, but he must have believed that I would still be a valuable asset to the team. He made a compromise for the time being. We would only produce one 3rd generation child. I reluctantly agreed to this and found one willing male and one willing female volunteer, the latter of whom became pregnant with a child within a week. The pregnancy, much like the aging process, had sped up exponentially--it was three months in when she had gone into labor, and I was called in to observe the birth of the child and take notes on it. It was an abomination. The skin was callus and had an ashy gray tone and covered in spots. The thing had no hair, and its eyes were enormous and as black as the deepest recesses of the sea, bulging out of its large and elongated head. Where a nose should have been, there was a small bump and two black slits that were spaced about three centimeters apart. It's mouth... my God. It didn't even have a mouth. Where its mouth once was, there was only a skin covering. It had no sexual organs, neither male nor female. It didn't even have any nipples or teats. God (if he exists) only knew how this... this thing would derive sustenance. What had we created? We had gone too far, we tried to play god, but God does not play with dice. We had to put the mother on suicide watch when she had seen what she had birthed. Something had snapped in her. She had become completely insane, rambling, and crying late into the night. She was locked in her room and was sent three food trays a day. Within three days the baby had learned to crawl and had grown twice as large. We took a sample of the beast's DNA and found that we were, in fact, successful. Forty-Six and Two.... This was the next evolutionary step in humankind. When I found this out, my blood ran cold and I turned pale and flush. Is this really what we would become? This monstrous and seemingly alien species of ugly creatures. Although this wasn't just about superficial looks, the creature was mean and vicious for no discernible reason that of which we could think. It would circle and harass the other patients, striking at them with its small hands. Shortly thereafter, we all started to feel increasingly tired. The more tired we grew, the more active and rambunctious the child would become. It was like it was feeding off of our life energies, and that's where it grew its sustenance. By the tenth day, its psychic powers were more powerful than any of our other subjects, and it had grown to the size of an adult human. It refused to speak through its telepathy and only showed disdain for those around. No empathy, no life within itself. It acted completely selfish with no regards to any of us. It fed off of our life-force, toyed with our minds, and was actively out to hurt everyone. One night, I was looking over my research notes when something strange happened. I was sitting at my desk, smoking my pipe when my left fist locked up.... and then my other fist. All of a sudden, I completely lost control of my body. I grabbed a pair of scissors and started jamming them into my wrist. Utter agony and fear gripped me all at once. I screamed as loud as humanly possible and attempted to break free of this trance-like state, but alas--it was hopeless. I had completely lost control of all motor functions and collapsed when the state had begun to subside over me. I got up and turned around to look at the door. It was that inhuman creature, standing upright on large hind legs with cold, empty eyes that seemed to stare into an infinite abyss, piercing my soul, towering over me at seven feet tall, simply glaring at me for what seemed like an eternity. When the beast was finished, it fell on all fours and scuttled away from the doorway. After I bandaged and patched up my arm, I thought of a scheme. The plan was simple: terminate the subject and leave the facility never to return. As this thought was passing through my head, my heart pumping, I went into an old lock-box of mine and grabbed my father's Smith and Wesson revolver. But, as I was loading the gun, I heard a voice that traveled in a whispered and hushed tone. "I heard that," it seemed to say to me. I jumped out of my chair and sprinted down the hallway, looking all over the facility for the damned beast. It was nowhere to be seen. It had escaped from the facility and had fled into the woods somewhere. I ran outside and into the tree-line, past the Farm, but there were no tracks left behind to tell me where this beast could have gone. I had no idea where it could have headed. I trudged through the dense forest very slowly, with only a flashlight in hand. Soon, I came to a crossing. In the bushes, something caught my eye. Slowly I approached whatever was in there, crunching my way through the dead, autumn foliage. There lay a dead stag in the bushes, no blood or wound anywhere on the carcass. Only two human-shaped hand prints on either side, seemingly burned into the chest and belly of the stag. Panic and terror swept over me, and I ran back to the Farm as fast as possible, dropping my flashlight along the way. When I got back to the Farm, I sat on the front steps of the facility for hours, thinking about what this could mean. This was the bleak and existential realization of what humanity would become. A cruel, evil shadow of its former self. I left that night, with all of my items back at the facility, even my father's gun. I never went back, and I was never again contacted by Desmond. Since then, I gave up the practices of science and have dedicated my life to finding this creature and putting its being to rest. The absolute, most terrifying thing about the whole ordeal is what we don't know about the beast: how it procreates, what it thinks, how it survives... I will walk the ends of this earth to atone for my sins. I tried to play God, and in the end, I lost. I never found out what became of Desmond. For all I know, he could still be sitting in that building to this day, still trying to play the role of God, still attempting to create these abominations against the will of nature. Edited by EmmaJean and TorusDrovenson Category:Science